Pigments made from multilayer structures are known. In addition, pigments that exhibit or provide a high chroma omnidirectional structural color are also known. Such pigments have required as many as 39 dielectric layers to obtain desired color properties and costs associated with production of multilayer pigments is proportional to the number of thin film layers. Accordingly, production of high chroma omnidirectional structural colors using multilayer thin films of dielectric materials can be cost prohibitive. The design of red color pigments face an additional hurdle to pigments of other colors such as blue, green, etc. Specifically, the control of angular independence for a red color is difficult since thicker dielectric layers are required, which results in a high harmonic design, i.e. the presence of the second and possible third harmonics is inevitable. Also, the hue space in Lab color space for dark red colors is very narrow and multilayer thin film that displays a red color has a higher angular variance.
Accordingly, a need exists for alternative multilayer interference thin films that have a reduction in the number of layers and reflect high chroma red structural colors in an omnidirectional manner.